Trop v. Dulles

Appellant
Albert L. Trop
Appellee
John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State
Appellant's Claim
That taking away his American citizenship amounted to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
Chief Lawyer for Appellant
Osmond K. Fraenkel
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
J. Lee Rankin, U.S. Solicitor General
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, William J. Brennan, Jr., William O. Douglas, Earl Warren (writing for the Court), Charles Evans Whittaker
Justices Dissenting
Harold Burton, Tom C. Clark, Felix Frankfurter, John Marshall Harlan II
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
31 March 1956
Decision
The Supreme Court reversed Trop's expatriation.
Significance
Although the cruel and unusual punishment argument made in this case was notdeveloped in subsequent expatriation cases, it became the crucial element indebate over the constitutionality of the death penalty in cases such as Gregg v. Georgia (1976).
Albert L. Trop was a native-born American. In 1944, he was a private in the U.S. Army, serving in French Morocco during World War II. Imprisoned there fora disciplinary offense, he escaped on 22 May. The next day he was picked upby an army truck and turned over to military police. Although Trop never offered any resistance and had been gone only one day, he was tried before a court-martial and convicted of desertion. He was sentenced to three years at hardlabor, forfeiture of all pay, and given a dishonorable discharge.
In 1952 Trop, by then a free man, applied for a passport. The State Department refused to issue one, citing a provision of the Immigration and NationalityAct of 1940 which made a conviction for wartime desertion and dishonorable discharge punishable by loss of American citizenship. In 1955, Trop sued in federal district court seeking a declaratory judgment that he was still a citizen. The district court ruled against him, as did the Court of Appeals for theSecond Circuit, and Trop then took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Court Rules That Denaturalization Is Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Trop was decided the same day as another denaturalization case, Perez v. Brownell, in which the Court voted 5-4 in favor of supporting Congress's power to strip American citizenship from someone who had voted in a foreign election. Chief Justice Warren had dissented in Perez, arguing that Congress had no power to deprive an American of his citizenship without his consent. In Trop, Warren announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion which was joined by only three other members. Warren's opinion reflected his view that however reprehensible wartime desertion might be,it did not signify allegiance to a foreign state. To deprive Trop of his citizenship was to impose upon him cruel and unusual punishment in violation ofthe Eighth Amendment. The prohibition was just as applicable here as in casesinvolving excessive physical punishment:

[T]he words of the Amendment are not precise, and . . . their scope is not static. The Amendment mustdraw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society . . . We believe . . . that the use of denaturalization as a punishment is barred by the Eighth Amendment. There may be no physical mistreatment, no primitive torture. There is instead the total destructionof the individual's status in an organized society.

Although in the end the Court voted to overturn the Immigration and Nationalization Act, it did so as a plurality. Justice Brennan voted with the majority, but he wrote a separate opinion in which he detailed his own reasons for doing so. While Justice Brennan did not agree that denaturalization amounted tocruel and unusual punishment, he concluded that it was not an appropriate exercise of Congress's war powers to punish wartime desertion with expatriation.
In Afroyim v. Rusk (1967), the Court overturned Perez, using Warren's argument in Trop as its rationale. This line of reasoning received its greatest attention, however, during the great debate among the justices over the death penalty. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the Court forthe first time struck down capital punishment as cruel and unusual punishment. Then four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court declared thatcapital punishment was not per se cruel and unusual, that "evolving standards of decency" did not hold that a death sentence was always unconstitutional. Under certain tightly controlled circumstances, the Court concluded, states could impose the death sentence for crimes so heinous that they offended civilized society.
Related Cases

• Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44 (1958).
  
• Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967).
  
• Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).
  
• Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976).

Rescinding American Citizenship
A United States citizen may, under certain circumstances, be stripped of heror his citizenship. A leading case on the loss of citizenship is Trop v. Dulles (1958). In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the loss ofcitizenship for desertion--without allegiance to a foreign power by the deserter--was cruel and unusual punishment under the Eight Amendment to the Constitution and beyond the war powers of Congress. In Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez (1963), the High Court held that a person who leaves the country during time of war to avoid military service may be deprived of his citizenship, but not without a hearing.
There are many actions that can lead to the loss of citizenship. These include obtaining naturalization in a foreign state, entering into the armed forcesof another state, accepting employment in the government of another state, formally renouncing one's United States nationality before a diplomat or consular officer in a foreign state, committing treason against the United States,and attempting to overthrow or bear arms against the United States.
Sources
West Encyclopedia of American Law, Vol. 2. Minneapolis, MN: West Publishing, 1998.